Millinery Links and Video!

I promise i'll get around to the rest of my book reviews soon! In the meantime though, i've come across a load of cool, interesting links online to other folks' hat book reviews, interviews with milliners, and videos...which of course i'd like to share here:

Reviews and Interviews

The blog "Bumped and Foxed" reviews a 1951 UK text here, The ABCs of Millinery by Madame Eva Ritcher. "Bumped and Foxed" is a blog that reviews serendipitously-found damaged books, which in and of itself is a pretty cool idea for a blog theme.

Here's an interview with New Orleans milliner Tracy Thomson of Kabuki Hats. Tracy is a self-taught millinery who works in a range of media like straw, recyclables, ribbon, and more. She talks about a lot of cool stuff in the interview, including dyeing toyo hatbodies in a former crawfish pot and a post-Katrina fashion show of garments and hats made entirely from blue tarp material (which covered most of the houses left standing in the city at that time).

An interview with UK milliner Stephen Jones. You've seen Jones' hats if you pay attention to haute couture and runway shows and the like. He's probably the second-most famous milliner in modern fashion. (The first being Philip Treacy.)

Western hatter "Big Al" Gonzales customizes cowboy hats! This one is part interview, part overview, and even features a video. Big Al shapes his hats by hand without hatblocks, just steam and sensibility.


Speaking of Videos!

Louise Green Millinery--great overview of how they produce made-to-order hand-blocked hats in a factory setting.

Watch this, if you have never seen Philip Treacy's hats in motion.

The process of carving hat blocks!

And, having just finished reading The Panama Hat Trail (reviewed in a previous post), i was excited to come across several videos on toquillo straw hat weaving in Ecuador, including an entire documentary broken up into 3 parts!

A short interview with a hat weaver
Weaving Life documentary, Part 1
Weaving Life documentary, Part 2
Weaving Life documentary, Part 3

Poll for Millinery Class: Time to choose a project (or two)

When i teach this millinery class, i always make at least one hat along with my students. Longterm readers will recall the 1830s bonnet, made in tandem with a lace-fronted wig, which my class affectionately dubbed "Aunt Pittypat."

This semester i'll be making many, several of which are already chosen in terms of their design because they are contemporary couture styles. However, i want to do at least one from a period resource, and i'm looking at several styles as options. I'm not doing this one in tandem with a wigmaker; our former Wardrobe Supervisor was the wigmaster who ventilated and styled the wig last time, and she's no longer on staff, having moved to Washington DC after her husband finished our Tech Production MFA. We've not found a new Wardrobe Supervisor (Recall the recent job posting regarding the Wardrobe opening here!), so there's nobody for me to ask whether they'd be into this type of project...and i'm sure not doing millinery AND ventilating a wig!

But i digress. I was posting about hat styles. Want to see and have some input?

( photographs of hat options... )

[Poll #1239807]

You can choose more than one!

And, a link of potential historic interest: as i was looking around for hat images, i came across the Stuhr Museum's page on women entrepreneurs on the Nebraskan frontier--some great period pix, especially the interior of a millinery shop and a dressmaking classroom of a "Domestic Institute." Cool stuff!